Inside the House of Horrors
For his portmanteau horror film Trapped Ashes, writer/producer Dennis Bartok has assembled a formidable team of directors, including Ken Russell and Joe Dante. Tim Hanan met up with him when he visited Ireland for the Dublin International Film Festival, and they chatted about Le Fanu, Kubrick, and the challenge of telling several stories within a single film.

Trapped Ashes is an anthology horror film about a group of people on a tour of a studio backlot, who get trapped in a ‘House of Horrors’, which they can’t leave unless they tell each other their most horrific personal stories. The first story, The Girl With the Golden Breasts, is directed by Ken Russell (The Devils, Gothic), and is about a struggling actress who gets breast implants that turn out to have a thirst for blood. The second is Jibaku, directed by Sean Cunningham (producer of Friday the 13th and The Last House on the Left), about an American couple who are haunted by the ghost of a monk whose body they find hanging in the grounds of a Japanese monastery. The third is Stanley’s Girlfriend, directed by Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop – this is his first directing gig in eighteen years), and is about a love triangle involving two filmmakers and a woman who turns out to be more than she appears. The fourth, My Twin, the Worm, is directed by John Gaeta (visual effects designer on The Matrix trilogy – this is his directorial debut), and is told by a woman who, during pregnancy, shared her mother with a tapeworm. The House of Horrors wraparound was directed by Joe Dante (Gremlins).

The film was written and produced by Dennis Bartok, who presented the movie at this year’s Jameson Dublin International Film Festival and participated in a round-table discussion hosted by the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild at the Irish Film Institute.
 
Dennis Bartok is a former head of programming for the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, and a screenwriter of some years’ standing. After selling a number of screenplays that weren’t getting made, he decided to produce one himself: ‘I realised at some point that if I was ever going to take control of this process, if I wanted my scripts to get made, I'd have to produce them myself. So I wrote Trapped Ashes specifically with that in mind, that it was a thing that we could do for a fairly modest budget, and through my contacts with the different directors that I was able to get on board.’

Because of the dark and occasionally disturbing subject matter, he was told he wouldn't be able to get funding in Hollywood, so he went elsewhere: ‘A Japanese husband and wife team who live in LA, Yuko [Yuko Yoshikawa] and Yoshi [Yoshifumi Hosoya], and together we used our contacts in Japan to raise all the financing there, with three other companies.’

Tim: Regarding your unmade scripts, is there a reason they haven’t been made, or are they just not happening?

Dennis: There are different reasons. You know, projects are just bought, and then they usually go through a development process. Unless they're sort of on a fast track, with a director or actor attached that has to do it within a certain window of time, projects can sit in development for years.

Do you think this film will help those get made?

I don't know, because it's a completely different genre, and it wasn't made within the studio system. So I don't know if this is going to have any impact, because those aren't horror films; the scripts that I sold weren't really genre movies, so I don't know if this will have any impact on that. I would hope so, but I can't say.

Apparently the segments are based on real events.

They were actually all inspired by true stories... [Stanley’s Girlfriend, which features a character called Stanley who is a soon-to-be-famous director] was inspired by some anecdotes told to me by a friend of mine called Hubert Cornfield, who sadly passed away last year. He was a very acclaimed director in his own right, he directed The Night of the Following Day with Marlon Brando and Richard Boone, a wonderful kind of dark thriller from the late sixties, and a film called Pressure Point. He was friends with ‘Stanley’, who you've probably guessed is Stanley Kubrick, in Hollywood in the 1950s. Stanley was dating a very beautiful blonde woman, who worked in a bookstore, and he left to make Paths of Glory. And he knew Hubert's reputation as a kind of skirt-chaser, and he said 'Hubert, just promise me, whatever you do, don't screw my girlfriend while I'm out of town.’ And of course Stanley hadn't been gone more than a week when Hubert looked up his girlfriend and started having sex with her. And she told Kubrick in a letter. This was Hubert's theory of why Kubrick never returned to the US, because he was betrayed by his girlfriend and his best friend. I don't know if it's true or not, but the facts are that Stanley never came back to the US, and he did marry an actress on Paths of Glory – his wife Christiane – and he stayed married to her until the end of his life…

The Japanese segment is actually based on something that happened to my wife and I when we were in Kyoto in March of 2002: we found the body of a man who had just hanged himself in the forest behind the cemetery in a 1,000-year old Buddhist temple. We were the first ones to find the body in a very remote section; he'd hanged himself probably twenty or thirty minutes prior to our finding the body. So we had to go find the nearest police box, and the police spoke no English, so we wound up sort of acting out charades and drawing little stick figures of a hanged man, to try and – it sounds comic... And that night we both had the same nightmare, which was that the spirit of the man was trying to crawl through the window of our hotel room. So that became the basis for the Jibaku story.

Several directors were considered for the segments, including Dario Argento for My Twin, the Worm and Tobe Hooper for The Girl With the Golden Breasts.

I had a wonderful conversation with Werner Herzog about directing the Japanese episode. He read the script, and we went out and had coffee afterwards. And he said, 'Dennis, I've read your script, and it is very good for a horror film, but I do not like horror films. I will tell you my idea of a horror film: It's a little boy, and he has lost his red ball up in a tree. And he's standing there with his arms outstretched, calling, but the ball will not come down, and the tree will not give up the ball. This is my idea of a horror film.' And while he was telling me, I completely believed it, and I wanted to make that movie. He was totally serious.

We got very lucky. Especially with Joe Dante, who directed the wraparound. I sent him the script, hoping he wanted an individual episode, and he goes 'Well, I've gotta tell you, I don't think I'm right for any of the episodes,' and I said 'Oh, that's a shame’, and he goes 'but I will direct the wraparound.' And I was really surprised because I thought, well, nobody's going to want to direct the wraparound... but in fact, it's sort of the skeleton that holds everything together—the stories are like the internal organs, and the wraparound is the skeleton. He did a wonderful job.

Can you tell me how the directors differed in their approaches?

It's very hard to talk in brief terms, because they're such unique filmmakers, and they're all, you know, totally different and individualistic. But I would say in short that, uh, Joe Dante is a consummate pro, he reminds me of, you know, one of the great Hollywood filmmakers in the ‘40s and ‘50s who had to shoot in a very low number of days. He would shoot one or two takes and then say, 'Okay, we've gotta move', you know—and again sort of a consummate pro.

Ken Russell has actually, I think, directed more than any of the other filmmakers, and maybe all the rest of them combined in his career; he has a tremendously long filmography. The crew really loved working with Ken, he was able to kind of pare each of the scenes down to the essential number of set-ups, and at times it was weird, it was like: 'Oh my God, is he going to get enough coverage?' And he always did. It was really amazing; I think the crew really loved him because they knew that he knew exactly what he needed to tell the story in a particular scene using the most economical means.

And then Sean, I think, is a very intuitive director, he likes to play around with the material, and sort of keeps his options open up until the last minute. He actually works beautifully with actors and I think sort of delves deeply into the psychology of the characters.

Monte is just a wonderful, almost spiritual director. He believes that directing is 95% casting, although I think in his case that, you know, he's being far too modest, but I think he did a wonderful job with the casting, with Tygh Runyan as the young Stanley, Tahmoe Penikett as the young Leo, and John Saxon as the older version of the character. And Amelia Cooke – I think once he got those people in place it really all came together for him.

And then John Gaeta, who did the last episode, it's actually his directing debut. He comes from a visual effects background. He assembled kind of a visual library beforehand of images and textures. You would think, coming from that background, that he might be more focused on the visual effects side of things, but it was completely the opposite. He was really about working with the actors, making sure that he told the story emotionally in the most direct and powerful way, and I think his episode in particular feels like a dark fairytale. One of my favourite single moments in the film is at the very end of John's episode when the young Natalie, who's played by an actress – a very good actress named Matreya Fedor – who gives that little smile when she sees her stepmother infected with her sort of twin tapeworm. It's just the slightest gesture and it's held for a fraction of an instant, but it's that sort of evil little smile that this very innocent-looking girl gives – that to me, is one of the most haunting things about the entire film.

Were there any creative conflicts?

I didn't have any rows as a writer, in fact it was much harder to work as producer. I'd sort of liken it to being at a carnival sideshow, where you have to stand there while people throw hardballs at your head, and after a while you just stop feeling them hit your skull. Because every day you'd have three or four things that seemed to be sort of planet-killer sized asteroids that were gonna destroy our film.

When we got into post-production, that was actually probably the most difficult in terms of dealing with the directors because most of the directors on this project hadn't worked on anthology films before. Ken Russell had worked on Aria [the 1987 opera-themed anthology film], but Joe Dante contributed to the film Twilight Zone: The Movie, and he was very smart. At the beginning of the editing process he goes ‘All right, Dennis, I'll tell you what's gonna happen. Every director's gonna say to you: “You can cut ten minutes from the other guy's movie, but don't touch mine”.’ And that's exactly what happened. Apart from Joe, the other directors didn't care about the other segments, Joe was the one who knew and loved these Amicus-type films and had the sense of what the entire movie should feel like.

And it was very difficult negotiating with each of the directors, trying to get them to see that we had to cut each of the episodes down as tightly as possible and yet still give them the creative freedom to express what they wanted to – which was the whole reason they came on board the project to begin with. And that's tough; that was hard: Ken Russell started to call me 'Dennis Scissorhands', which was a joke, but it was also hard for me to hear, because in my previous job at the Cinematheque I had sort of devoted myself to finding the longest possible version of Ken Russell's movies – you know, the long version of The Boyfriend, or the uncut The Devils. And then to be in the opposite position of saying, 'Ken, sorry, you're going to have to cut nine minutes off your segment.’

How have the people who inspired the stories responded to them?

Well, sadly my friend Hubert Cornfield, who told me the story about his relationship with Stanley, passed away last year. He had a diabetic seizure and then died several months later, so he was never able to see the film. The last episode My Twin The Worm is based on a story told to me by my good friend Gwen Deglise, who still works at the American Cinematheque – she programs the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. It's basically about her as a foetus, growing up side by side in her mother's womb with a large intestinal tapeworm. She hasn't seen the film yet; she wanted to wait and see it on the big screen. I think she read the script, and we talked at length about her own personal experience. I made voluminous notes, and I would say about 70% of that episode is based on her real life experiences.

And then, my wife Susan has seen the film – she was actually the first one to discover the body of the hanged man in Japan, which was the inspiration for the Jibaku episode. So it was very hard for her, I think, to watch that episode at first, because it was like déjà vu; it was like reliving that experience all over again. Even though the events are based on what my wife and I went through, Henry and Julia are much more loosely based on people that I knew when I lived in New York, a certain kind of upscale, very driven New York, kind of power couple. In this, he's an architect and she's an interior designer, and I tried to kind of base it on people that I knew who might live down in Soho, and love each other, but were so consumed by their jobs they let the emotional part of their relationship kind of wither and die. Henry, in particular, sort of wakes up to it too late, when his wife has disappeared and literally walks into the mouth of Hell to try and get her back.

I understand you're directing your next film.

I am, I'm raising financing to direct a script that I wrote called Knives, which is about obsession and adultery, and a group of characters whose lives are all connected by their contact with a single murderous blade that's made by this enigmatic knife-maker in the redwood forests of California. So the knife is a little bit like the ring in The Lord of the Rings: it affects everybody that it touches. It's not an anthology story so much, but it does, like Sin City, involve a number of different characters whose stories are all interconnected.

Do you still see yourself fundamentally as a writer, or are you now a writer/director/producer?

Yeah, I would say at this point I’m moving away from just thinking as a screenwriter, and thinking more and more – because there are projects that I'm producing that I didn't write – I'm working with different writers and directors solely in the position of producer. I'm working now with a colleague here in Ireland, John Lynch, and Subotica Films on another project for Monte Hellman to direct, which hopefully we'll be shooting in late summer in Ireland. It’s an adaptation of the famous Sheridan Le Fanu story 'Carmilla', about two young women who fall in love, and one of whom happens to be a vampire – it’s set in the early 1800s. It's been adapted a number of times before: very beautifully by Roger Vadim, as Blood and Roses; Carl Dreyer did a version, Vampyr, and Roy Ward Baker did The Vampire Lovers. But this is going to be in the original period; a lot of the other versions updated it to contemporary times, we're keeping it as a period film. And I know Monte really wants to focus on the emotional relationship between the two women, and the kind of haunting overwhelming sense of melancholy which is one of the hallmarks of Le Fanu’s style as a writer.

Would you say you’ve learned much about directing from working on Trapped Ashes?

Yeah, I have to say it was amazing. You know, I've been an admirer and a fan of Ken's work, and Joe and Monte – all these filmmakers – for so long, so I was basically kicking myself the whole time we were making Trapped Ashes, not quite believing that I was working with these, you know, incredible filmmakers whose work I admired, and I'd screened their previous films over the years at the Cinematheque... Hopefully if I absorbed something karmically from each of them it would be wonderful.

I will say that each of the directors exhibited enormous patience and, even though we were on a very tight schedule, each of them had certain things that they really wanted to get and really wanted to get the right way. And they were willing to wait to get those, and they always found a way, you know, even if it meant taking an extra couple of hours on certain scenes, they were willing to make up for it on the other end. And in the end it all worked out wonderfully.

How do you feel about the responses you've been getting to the film?

I think we've gotten really good responses. We always knew that the core audience for this would be hardcore horror fans, because it is a horror film about horror movies. And even calling it a horror film is maybe a bit of a misnomer, because when you say that, people are expecting that it's going to be a really scary or suspenseful film, but it's not a suspense horror film, it's more sort of a dark fantasy slash horror…

And when you look at the mix of directors, Ken and Monte really come from that kind of arthouse, very individualistic, visionary class of filmmaking; Joe and Sean are more kind of hardcore genre directors, and John comes from a visual effects background, with this being his first film as director. I actually think their different perspectives and approaches give the film a lot of variety. For me, one of the biggest concerns was making sure the entire film worked, that people would enjoy watching Trapped Ashes, as well as the individual segments. I'm hoping we've succeeded, that people really like the entire film as a unit, as well the pieces.

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